Facebook mobile booming, still no iPad app

Unofficial Facebook app for iPad app called Friendly now has 1.1 million monthly users

With well over 500 million users worldwide, it should come as little surprise that Facebook has one of the most popular mobile applications around.

On the iPhone alone, Facebook boasts 31.3 million daily active users and 57.3 million monthly active users, according to All Facebook. That’s a gain of 4.6 monthly users, or 9% growth, since Nov. 27. Facebook for Android and BlackBerry attract 20.9 and 26.9 million monthly active users, respectively.

Combined, that’s 105.1 million monthly users of Facebook on the three most popular smartphone platforms. Back in early November, however, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said that over 200 million people actively access the social site through all its various mobile offerings. Unless the company’s statistics are drastically inflated, we’re left with another 95 million users or so that must either access the site via a browser or on alternative platforms.

That would actually make a lot of sense in other countries, since mobile versions of Facebook like m.facebook.com and 0.facebook.com are both designed to be light on data charges.

"The only platform bigger than us is the mobile Web itself," Zuckerberg had declared.

He also said something else that got some laughs out of the room. The iPad “isn’t mobile,” he argued, when someone asked why there was no Facebook app for iPad. “Sorry, it’s a computer.”

Of course, since Apple has probably sold something close to 10 million iPads at this point, an official Facebook app for iPad would obviously be a hit. But because Facebook is neglecting the platform, somebody else was just bound to fill the niche.

Friendly, an unofficial Facebook iPad app that launched earlier this year, has about 1.1 milllion monthly active users, according to All Facebook. That means more than one in 10 iPad owners has this bootleg app installed.

Though it’s a far cry from the tens of millions using Facebook’s official smartphone apps, there’s bound to be a point where the company steps in to take back its users.

...Right?

Check out the AppVee review of Friendly for iPad below: